New York state has enacted a bill to extort fossil fuel companies in the name of climate change. Governor Kathy Hochul believes the bill will generate $75 billion in funds for the state over the next 25 years, which she claims will be used to fight climate change.
Why would any energy company want to operate out of New York? The fines for merely existing are unclear, but the New York Department of Environmental Conservation will begin determining the extent of each company’s greenhouse gas emissions. Worse, they will begin fining companies for the amount they began releasing 24 years ago in 2000. ANY company that the department deems “responsible” for greenhouse gas emissions is subject to a fine.
Vermont was the first state to enact such a law under the Climate Superfund Act. Oil and energy companies are mandated to pay into a climate change fund if they have released over 1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases from 1995 – nearly 30 years ago – until now.
“This bill represents a major step forward in ensuring that responsible parties, like Big Oil – companies like ExxonMobil and Shell that have known for decades that their products are disrupting the climate – be required to also pay a fair share of the cleanup costs,” the Vermont Natural Resources Council said after blaming the industry for the catastrophic flooding that occurred earlier in the year.
American Petroleum Institute declared that this tax unjustifiably violated due process of rights. Society at large is dependent on fossil fuels, but these taxes aim to extort profitable companies that have been providing a service to the public. Both Vermont and New York have also failed to explain how they will calculate emissions or the true costs involved.
Imagine if the government told you that you needed to pay additional taxes spanning back decades. This is absolute insanity and yet another brain-dead policy aimed at punishing fossil fuels. Stepping on the neck of a crucial sector is not how to generate state revenue. Anyone cheering that these laws punish Big Oil fails to understand that these fees will simply be passed down to the consumer as residents of New York and Vermont should expect to pay more in energy costs in the near term.
